Visible Mending with Juno Lamb in Sandwich this week

This week: Sandwich Home Industries, the fine crafts gallery of Center Sandwich, NH welcomes beginner to experienced makers and menders to join them for Visible Mending with Juno Lamb on Thursday, July 12, 2018 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in Center Sandwich. Bring clothing you wish to “visibly mend”—ripped blue jeans or button-down shirts are a great place to start. Please give them a ring to register, 603-284-6831.

What is visible mending? Using techniques inspired by many cultures and traditions, colorful threads, and diverse fabrics, visible mending offers us a fun and “mendful” way to care for and embellish beloved garments, extending their use and deepening the story they tell. Many of the techniques also translate to invisible mending.

Why mend when we can go buy a new t-shirt for five bucks? The global fast fashion that allows us to do that has enormous environmental and human rights costs. You can learn more, if you wish, by watching The True Cost, available free on many streaming services. “It’s not just the damage being done around the globe,” Lamb says. “We pay a personal cost, as well, when we give up our agency and skills to multinationals, and forget that we can create and care for the physical objects in our lives. And we miss out on a lot of fun!”

Fun, connection and an opportunity to slow down in a busy world, to work at human speed, rather than digital speed. Repetitive motion activities such as sewing and knitting increase serotonin in the brain and decrease cortisol; they are by their nature soothing (except when your thread gets tangled). And these are wonderful activities to do in community—working with your hands allows plenty of time for chatting and getting to know your neighbors. If you enjoy it, you might consider hosting a regular mending “sewcial”.

Juno Lamb is a lifelong maker, mender, textile artist and teacher. She’s constructed and embellished wedding garments, knitted in binary code, painted a farmers’ market worth of vegetables onto silk shoes, made a diversity of dolls, and mended more clothing and textiles than she can remember. One of her motivating desires is to work with secondhand textiles—to repurpose and reuse castoffs. “And scraps!” she says. “Like the threads in my great-grandmother’s box marked ‘string too short to be used.’” Another is to work in community, “to create opportunities for people to realize they can do this too, whatever the ‘this’ is.”

Sandwich Home Industries - League of NH Craftsmen Fine Craft Gallery
603-284-6831, sandwichcraftgallery@gmail.com, centersandwich.nhcrafts.org